“That’s fine,” he said. “Well, I’m sure we’ll run into each other later.”

He thinks it’s a brush-off, she thought.

And then: if I do want to brush him off, this is a good moment.

She directed her thoughts back to the previous night.

She’d wanted company. She’d got company.

She’d wanted a diversion from her troubled thoughts more certain than Carroll’s Pillow Problems or Goldbach’s Conjecture. She’d been diverted.

And, in the end, she’d had a great time.

Again would be nice.

For her.

For him it would be commitment, which spelled complication. Mig might hop around like a wise old wallaby, but in this respect he was little more than a joey.

What the hell! she thought. So long as she enjoyed the hopping, she could deal with a bit of complication.

She said, “I’ll probably come up to the Hall later. There are questions I want to ask that old bastard too.”

Not enough. She saw it in his eyes.

She went to him, stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, leaving some cake crumbs there.

Still ambiguous, she saw. You might get as much from a nun.

Hell, if he wanted unambiguous, let him have it.

She put her hand on his inner thigh and squeezed hard.

“Keep practicing the counting,” she murmured.

Then she broke away from him and half walked, half danced out of the kitchen, chewing on her slice of cake.

He watched her go, his heart bursting with delight. He wanted to run after her and suggest that without further ado they dropped everything that had brought them here to Illthwaite and went away together. But it was easy for him, he reproved himself. The injustice to his family was five hundred years old. Her pain derived from something in living memory, and its perpetrators were probably still living also.

He put his hand to his cheek, picked off the crumbs he felt there, and licked them off his fingers.

Then he went to the phone and dialed Max Coldstream’s number.

As Sam made her way to Candle Cottage, her super-analytical mind had plotted Madero’s thought processes with a degree of accuracy which might have worried him.

He had described his efforts to subdue his natural young appetites in an entertaining way, but his comic narrative had not been able to conceal the huge expense of will which had gone into repressing and rechanneling these energies.

Now at last the fruit which his own choice had for so many years put completely out of his reach had fallen into his hands, its taste all the sweeter for the long delay (and perhaps also for a disappointment with Frek). At the moment, in the afterglow of that bliss, he could not entertain the notion that their coupling had been sinful. Indeed this experience seemed so intense that it figured as the single most important thing in his life.

She told herself he would certainly be feeling exactly the same if it had been Frek Woollass he’d been able to have his wicked way with.

Not that his way was all that wicked. Not yet. But, as she’d told him, he was a fast learner and it might be fun being his mentor.

Then, because her powers of analysis did not permit self-deceit, she took a further step back and gently mocked herself for trying to assume the safe role of experience guiding the steps of innocence.

She liked the guy!

Why? Here her powers of logical analysis failed her. He was so many things she didn’t go for. Physically she preferred the blond Anglo type, like her namesake the unfortunate curate as he appeared in Winander’s painting. As for the inner man, there were so many counts against him, it was hardly worth counting! He was serious, and spooky, and religious, plus he’d traveled a helluva long way down the road to becoming a Catholic priest.

She tried to imagine her pa’s reaction if she took Mig home.

The wine might help. A bottle of El Bastardo to whet the appetite, followed by a couple of Vinada’s gold-medal Shiraz to wash down the grub…

But first she’d have to get Pa to sit down at the same table, which wouldn’t be easy, even though she could now assure him it definitely wasn’t a priest who’d knocked up her grandmother.

She’d made no effort to contact home since her talk with Betty. She needed to get this business sorted completely before she did that. The bastard who’d abused that poor little kid had lived round here. The Gowder twins’ dad seemed number one suspect, and he had gone beyond justice, at least beyond hers if not Mig’s. But, dead or not, she wanted to be certain. And that was what she should be focusing her mind on now, not her own romantic entanglements.

The door of Candle Cottage stood open. She stepped into the living room, calling, “Mr. Melton, hi!”

“And hi to you too, Miss Flood.”

He came out of the kitchen carrying a tray set with two mugs, a coffeepot and a plateful of biscuits, mostly dark chocolate. He’d remembered. She was touched. He might be, in the local parlance, a bit cracked, but she found she quite liked Noddy Melton. However she looked at it, she still felt it was a crying shame no one had ever told him that his lost Mary was alive and well and living in Spain. But it wasn’t her call. She had enough on her plate without taking onboard that responsibility.

As she sat down, without thinking she took her sun hat off and laid it on the arm of her chair.

He regarded her skull birdlike, head cocked to one side.

“When I first joined the Force they encouraged haircuts like that,” he said. “I take it the lady in Newcastle told you they cut your gran’s hair off?”

“With shears,” she said. Then added, “I never mentioned Newcastle.”

He shrugged, self-deprecatingly. Apologetically. That was the giveaway.

She said, “And you knew I was a mathematician before I told anyone. It was you who searched my room!”

“So you did notice? Sharp. I’m sorry. I was curious. And as I think you’ve discovered, you need to be nimble on your feet and willing to cut corners to keep ahead of the game in Illthwaite. Sorry. But I’ve no way, legal or illegal, of discovering what you found out in Newcastle, not unless you care to tell me.”

She told the whole story again. This was the third time. The first had been to Edie Appledore and that had been like reliving her own experience of hearing it. The second had been to Mig and that had been a kind of cathartic sharing, bringing her to a closeness which made all that followed possible.

This time it felt, perhaps not unfittingly, like a statement made to a policeman.

He nodded when she’d finished and said, “I thought it might be something like that. Not the detail but the timing. After the first time we talked, I got to thinking, there’s too much going on here for there to be no connections. The name; the circumstances of the curate’s death; above all, Illthwaite. The only thing which stopped it making any sense was your dates. Spring 1960. If somehow you’d got that wrong, then we’d got ourselves a whole new ball game. Everyone leaves traces, even kids. If she lived in Illthwaite even for a short time, she’d be on the school roll.”

“I thought of that but the school closed down a couple of years back.”

“Schools die, records don’t. Oh, they might be dusty and spidery, but they’d still exist somewhere. I made a phone call. Yesterday morning I got a call back.”

“Useful friends you’ve got,” said Sam.

“Who said anything about friends?” said Melton. “You don’t get to the top of most heaps without knowing where a lot of bodies are buried. Here’s what I found out.”

He handed her a sheet of paper. It was headed Pamela Galley and contained all the details she’d got from Edie Appledore.

Not wanting to downgrade his efforts, she said, “This is great.”

He gave her a sharp look and said, “You knew this already, didn’t you?”